The Life of Milarepa (Namthar)

The Life of Milarepa (rnam thar, literally "complete liberation", the Tibetan term for a saint's biography) is Tibet's most widely read book and one of humanity's great spiritual narratives. It tells the story of Mila Thöpaga, a boy from a well-to-do family in western Tibet, born according to the traditional chronology in 1040, who after his father's death sees his uncle and aunt seize the inheritance and reduce his mother, his sister and himself to poverty. Urged on by his mother, he learns black magic and takes revenge: he brings a house down during a wedding feast, killing thirty-five people, and then destroys the harvest with hail. That crime is the starting point of everything else.

Repentant and terrified of the karmic consequences of his deeds, he seeks the Dharma and ends up at the feet of Marpa the Translator, the master who had brought Naropa's teachings from India. Marpa, instead of teaching him, subjects him for years to gruelling and apparently absurd trials: building stone towers with his own hands and pulling them down again and again, until he raises the nine-storey tower still shown today in Lhodrak. Only when despair has purified his karma does Marpa initiate him. Milarepa then meditates in solitude, returns to his village, finds his mother's bones in the ruined house and resolves to devote the rest of his life to practice in the caves of the Himalaya, living on nettles until his skin turns green, clad only in a cotton cloth — hence his name, repa, "the cotton-clad" — thanks to the inner heat of tummo. In the end he attains enlightenment, trains disciples such as Rechungpa and Gampopa, and dies poisoned by a jealous scholar, whom he forgives.

The book is at once a novel of formation, a treatise on karma and a manual of practice. Its thesis is radical: even a murderer can attain Buddhahood in a single lifetime if he gives himself wholly to practice and to his master. It was composed by Tsangnyön Heruka in 1488, four centuries after the events, on the basis of earlier biographies, and written in the first person, as Milarepa's own account to his disciple Rechungpa, its structure modelled on the twelve deeds of the Buddha's life. That direct voice, the vividness of its scenes and its blend of rawness and tenderness explain why for five centuries it has been the gateway to Buddhism for Tibetans of every station and, since the twentieth century, for readers all over the world.